More and more companies are becoming aware of the value of using social media monitoring to identify and respond to customer complaints. The classic case was that of Comcast user who in May 2008 tweeted about a problem with the reception on his High Definition television. Minutes later a Twitter user named ComcastCares responded and within 24 hours a technician was at his house to fix the problem. The customer happened to be a marketing expert who then went on to blog and podcast about the experience. Clearly a lucky break for Comcast as they got significant PR from this episode.

Of course customer service is critical. However responding to Twitter makes even more sense. For one thing customers on Twitter are very likely to be highly connected if they receive an above average level of service they are bound to communicate that to others.

I found another great example today of an American Express user who had be refused credit after 27 years. He blogged about it – within 3 days of the blog post American Express had contacted him, candidly discussed the problem and reinstated his card. Ok so it wasn’t quite as quick as Comcast but the point is that the fellow then went on to blog about American Express in a very positive way. Responding to complaints in a proactive way is a quick way to build deep customer loyalty. To turn a naysayer into an advocate with a quick call is a huge win for any organization.

Monitoring the online conversation about your company is a key way that companies can understand and develop their brands reputation. But even more importantly using Twitter be can respond extremely quickly as Comcast have shown. This is especially the case where customer service often involves spending hours in line on the phone. A quick response is a good story and people will share it.

Here at SociaLNK we like to help businesses develop extraordinary customer service that enables positive stories to become part of your reputation.

American Express has been working hard to develop it’s online community for small businesses. The site has increased in popularity rapidly. The new version of OPEN Forum just launched a few weeks ago and the numbers point toward success. They had 164,000 weekly page views and 4,000 business have registered and made profiles for themselves.

Marcella Shindler described their approach at a recent event. She described this as a tactic in pull marketing. She said in summary their aim was to “Have something differentiated to say, get influencers to say it, and use social media to allow it to scale”.

The site contains two main areas. The first is the idea hub, which is a space for business owners to blog about topics they are passionate about. The categories include innovation, lifestyle, managing, marketing, money, technology, and the world. Just doing a quick search on google showed me that quite a lot of small business corporate bloggers were blogging about the fact that they had had articles accepted on Open Forum. This is clearly a site that carries some kudos for them. One of Open Forums strategies has been to engage high profile bloggers such as Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin to provide “gravitas” for the site. These blogs are promoted on Twitter which is the thrid highest ranking driver of traffic to the site.

The other section is the connectodex, which is a creditialized community of business owners, as they have been approved for an AMEX business card account. The idea here is that this is a curated set of businesses that you can trust to build up relationships with. In doing this AMEX have put their finger on a key issue in social networking. How do you develop trust? It will be interesting to see how this curated approach works out.

What sort of online community would your customers value? SociaLNK would like to help you think out a community strategy for your context.